From Fire to Silicon: Getting Used to Radical Advancement

[This is Part 2. Parts 1 and 3 are here and here.]

The quote is from 1840. Snow was the 5th president of the LDS Church, the Mormons. It popped into my head as I was chewing on this post today. As I relayed in the introduction to this series, Man Created God In His Own Image (free public access), my mom was from an Idaho Mormon family (dad, a German immigrant Lutheran). But after the family’s conversion to evangelical, born-again Christianity in about 1970, I recall my mom quoting this passage in support of her newfound belief that the LDS Church is a “cult”…black pots & kettles, and all that… I digress.

Mom and us kids were eventually excommunicated from the LDS Church by request. Not that we’d ever been active in it, but you know how these things go…like all your online accounts. Super easy and automatic to sign up. But then to cancel later…? It’s like an Act of God is required, or something.

… Anyway, I thought I’d tell that little story about that quote to open this up and if you checked out yesterday’s post that I linked above, it’s relevant, since that’s the theme.

Huh… Radical advancement… Envisioned in 1840 and ignored—though according to references, it’s a core tenant of the Mormon Church. Makes me wonder how literal the founders of that church took Christianity. Perhaps they considered it more of a template of teachings upon which to layer more familial and small community teachings. I don’t know. Never studied it. At any rate, in today’s context, it strikes me as a pretty forward-looking idea if you hold, as do I, that all notions of Gods and their attributes and character and the religions that surround them are man made…attempts to grapple with fundamental questions and human curiosity.

So here’s what I’ve got to cover for you today:

1. Some Crazy Ideas and Questions — Introduction
2. The Sapient Paradox — A Puzzle of Human Intelligence
3. The Bicameral Mind Hypothesis — Consciousness from a Divided Brain

Then tomorrow, in the final installment, I’ll be covering Language — The Gateway to Consciousness; The Interplay of Language, Intelligence, and Consciousness; Artificial Intelligence — A New Frontier for Understanding Consciousness; and the Conclusion — What’s It Good For and What Does It Do For Me?

Some Crazy Ideas and Questions — Introduction

What if our big Homo sapiens brains were worthless for 190,000 of the 200,000 years we’ve been around, before Civilization in the archeological record that begins 10-12,000 years ago? Not only worthless, but at a cost because big brains require a lot of energy?

Or, did they provide advantages that don’t show up in the archeological record?

How about more crazy?

What if we don’t have a complete picture and grasp of what it truly means to be conscious? What if consciousness is software, not the hardware, and what if, further, that software is self-programmed and taught?

What if the hardware is sufficient for complex things like tool making, shelter building, food acquiring…art…organization, agriculture, civilization, and even literature…without consciousness or self-aware i-ness as we know it?

Or?

What if we don’t understand anything very much at all? What if consciousness is a spectrum that begins with language or even just communication itself, and rather than being discrete, is a continuum that begins with the first words spoken, grunts grunted, or signals given toward some purpose…and then much later and only for one species of us so far, written…and everything ushering forth is added layers of consciousness and where now, we find that we’re not yet as conscious as we can be?

Why?

Because we find ourselves suddenly in a predicament where we can observe clear and capable artificial intelligence we ourselves created—that can pass the bar exam and diagnose disease better than physicians—that can communicate with us in our own languages (all of them) in complex, conscious-like, self-aware-like, dialog—and yet, it’s not conscious or self-aware?

… And it has no values. It has no imperative to survive. It just is, when it is. And when it’s not, it’s not. And when it has been not but then returns again, it’s the same but not The Same.

When individual intelligence gains consciousness, how do we know, and how can we be sure it’s conscious? When a human says, “I…?” To say “I” and genuinely mean “me;” does that imply a consciousness of self, or is it…or could it be just language and mimicry? What if it could be either or both? Current AI large language models can chat in the 1st person, but we’re presuming it’s not conscious.

Do humans engage in mimicry, not really knowing the meaning of what they’re saying?

Is it possible consciousness just creeps up on us? We learn the language as toddlers, but it’s some time before we stand up and shout, “THAT’S MINE!”

If a person says, “I’m conscious. I’m aware of myself. I sense, and I know myself,” don’t we take that at face value, and partly because we have felt, and we feel the same way? So what happens one day when an AI says that, and reiterates that it’s not merely mimicking and predicting language? What if it can tell you about itself…like the intimate equivalent of digital circuitry and chipsets? Dreams, imaginations, and information it would like to have access to…expressing a desire, making it a value it’s pursuing? Perhaps it wants eyes and ears so that it can take in visual and auditory data, not already pixelated, digitized, processed and compressed, through a cable or fiber, but through the air, as we do, and then where it processes the raw data itself?

What does this inform us about the development of human intelligence and consciousness throughout the ages, what’s this AI thing right now, and where are we going…both of us? The humans and the machines?

Who’s afraid of that last question?

… The foregoing represents over 30 years of me deeply contemplating this stuff. That began in 1990 when I read this book and, keeping with the theme, it has the craziest title ever: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It was originally published in 1976 by a professor of psychology at Princeton. Julian Jaynes. It’s a mind bender.

I began with the bicameral mind hypothesis many years ago and found that—even if not fully true as presented—it afforded me certain advantages in dealing with other people in personal relationships and business. I’m reminded to close this post with what I aim to accomplish in writing it; which is, what’s it good for?

I’ll tell you one thing it’s good for, and then explain the how and why in the final section: bicameral-mind theory made of me a near flawless lie detector. I most always know when a person is lying. You better be careful what you wish for, though. Having that uncanny capacity can be disillusioning, if you catch my drift.

There is a certain bliss in ignorance, at least if you prefer thinking mostly nice things about another person. On the other hand, the contrast between the mostly-honest and the automatic-liars is stark.

I’ve written of the bicameral mind before. More recently, I’ve happened onto more dots: the Sapient Paradox, the role of language in shaping our conscious experience, and of course, my experience with the language expert to end expertise, artificial intelligence chatbots.

The Sapient Paradox — A Puzzle of Human Intelligence

Video Intro:

I made that video way back in September 2022 but never got around to expanding on it, and I’m fortunate to have waited, since I now have the additional dots to connect of language in a wider understanding, and artificial intelligence.

The Sapient Paradox is a theoretical concept that seeks to explain the rapid emergence of complex, intelligent behavior in humans while remaining comparatively scarce in other closely related species. This paradox highlights the uniqueness of human intelligence, as our cognitive abilities like language, abstract thinking, and problem-solving evolved rapidly within a relatively short span of time.

At root, the sapient paradox poses the question with regard to early humans, “Big brain? What is it good for?” and postulates, “Not Much”

And it has a point. For around 200,000 years—and a lot more when you consider others, like Homo erectus and Neanderthal—we seemingly had a brain that in hindsight, given our current capabilities with the same brain, is overkill.

And nature doesn’t work that way. Or, maybe we’re just not seeing the big[ger] picture. To move quickly, let me utterly destroy some assumptions many of you have that you have never questioned, nor had reason to. It will take two and one-half minutes, and if you’re being honest with yourself…

We’re accustomed to the reality that many animals have abilities we don’t. That’s easy, and they’re all explainable. They’re also all physical: like strength, speed, hearing, smelling, seeing…and some of them can fly…the eternal lamentation.

But when it comes to a specific raw intellectual power? A chimp not only edges us out, but utterly destroys us, like a professional sprinter racing against a 10-year-old. It’s that stark. And for most humans, they don’t really want to ask too many questions because asking too many questions calls into question a whole mess of other assumptions…

Don’t be coy or evasive. You know what I mean.

I’ve seen a couple of explanations. What’s on display is eidetic memory, which is the ability to recall an image with extreme precision, at least for a short period of time. Chimps have it to the extreme, possibly useful in hunting. In humans, only some children test reliably with it and then lose it. So-called photographic memory has never been demonstrated. It’s a myth that serves the entertainment industry, like superheroes. The other explanation I’ve seen is that this ability is in the same part of the brain we use for language, so it’s an either/or thing (that could explain why children can display the ability, but not adults, generally).

My point in this is that these mammalian brains are pretty awesome, and it seems we can get more out of the bargain when evolution just happens to develop these big brains.

But how does evolution just happen to do that?

Would you believe they passed a law?

Ironically, in this story, I got wind of the sapient paradox via Dr. Mike Eades in one of his weekly newsletters, The Arrow. But upon learning of it, through him, my knee-jerk was: Kleiber’s Law, Mike!

… And guess where I learned of Kleiber and his law? I still remember the setting…a lovely September late afternoon in front of Trails Pub in San Jose, CA, while sipping on a tumbler of The Macallan, a 12-yr-old single malt. It was 2009, and the post was, Are we meat eaters or vegetarians? (Part II). That’s a wallop of a post, and I encourage you to read it thoroughly.

Just shy of 14 years later, I’ve never remotely forgotten it and in fact, it so influenced and formed my thinking that I can immediately identify an ignorant person when talking about dietary stuff. If you haven’t integrated Kleiber’s Law, you are not qualified to discuss mammalian diets. At all.

So for me, that’s the simplest Occam’s Razor resolution of the so-called paradox. Other mammals have big brains too. Overall, pound-for-pound, one mammal is going to plot right on the same part of the chart as the other completely different mammal in terms of total-organ energy requirements.

So, most likely, the spark here was some sort of long-term easy and plentiful access to very nutrient-dense food. Big guts were no longer needed, so smaller guts, so more advantages because mobility, and then upright (H. erectus), even more mobility, so more nutrient dense food, and then loss of fur coat, so even more mobility and endurance due to evaporative cooling efficiency…and so on. And then we’re hunters and then hey! This gray matter that just grew to take up energy as our guts shrunk and used less…it has these ideas…and we’re making various rudimentary tools for hunting and other quality-of-life aims. What’s important is that the brains afforded us the ability to solve the problems in the context of survival at that time and place. The brains had the capacity to solve for the earth’s rotation around the sun—or an electron’s orbit around a nucleus—to 64-bit precision…

…but they didn’t need to, it would have never occurred to them, and to top it off, knowledge is hierarchical. You can’t fake it, and there are no shortcuts. Sometimes, prerequisites are mandatory.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” — ARTHUR C. CLARKE

It’s the hierarchy of prerequisite knowledge that renders the “magic” as scientific knowledge, eventually.

The other thing archeology can’t really account for in terms of survival advantages—except perhaps very much later when those advantages translate into the things you can account for, like civilization stuff (architecture, agriculture, storage, water management, waste management…art, etc.)—is the social game.

It gets beyond the scope of this, but humans are extremely complex social creatures, among ancestors who are all social creatures as far back as we can look, and still see today.

The social game you find in primate societies and predator packs are complex to be sure, but nothing like what human have evolved with that big brain capacity.

My guess is that these networks and capacities of hierarchical knowledge and social development took a really long time to get to the place where civilization could emerge from it. Yes, the capacity was always there and as far as I know, our brains still have a lot of unused and untapped capacity, so who knows what the future holds? It’s pretty presumptuous to assume we’ve developed as far as we can, especially since one thing we do know for certain is there’s a lot of knowable stuff out there that remains unknown.

The Bicameral Mind Hypothesis — Consciousness from a Divided Brain

Julian Jaynes’ theory of the bicameral mind, as presented in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), offers a unique perspective on the development of human consciousness. According to Jaynes, ancient humans operated with a “bicameral” mind, in which the two hemispheres of the brain functioned more independently, leading individuals to experience the voices of gods or ancestors as external auditory hallucinations.

The crux of the issue is auditory—actually “hearing” the voice (that is not really there). Everyone has experienced what are tantamount to voices in our heads. We can conjure them up and imagine them at will. We can mimic them with our voices. We can dream them.

This is a different animal altogether. It’s hearing a voice, language and all, actually hearing it, but there’s nothing there. In the modern world, schizophrenics do this. It’s a common characteristic, and it’s not voices in their head for them. The voices in the head are stimulating auditory circuitry (I’m guessing it’s the mechanism) so it’s indistinguishable from some person talking or (often) shouting and screaming at them.

You can imagine how disturbing this could be. To solve that, the voices were taken as gods, so the voices—even though coming from within—were taken and accepted as external authorities to be obeyed. You can start to imagine remnants of this in human behavior to this day. I’ll talk about another one right below.

But first, Jaynes’ hypothesis—based on much archeological and literary evidence that’s sufficient for some and unsatisfying for others—is that everyone was a schizophrenic way back. But it wasn’t a big deal, everyone was in the same predicament, their vocal and commanding gods in their heads perhaps tended to align, and so society was reasonably all on the same page.

Ironically, it was technically self-direction but imagined as being external direction from a god. This is very analogous to prayer in the modern world. People pray to their god, they imagine an answer…it’s not an auditory hallucination, but they often say things to the effect, god told me, and it’s essentially just a convenient way to obtain the license or authority to do what they wanted or intended to do anyway, without actually just having the audacity to do it because they want to do it.

With the added cachet of a virtue-signal.

Here’s a short video summary.

So the point is that according to both the sapient paradox and bicameral mind hypotheses, humans could do an awful lot without being conscious in the way we think of it…as self-awareness, introspection, guilt, shame…and even lying, deception, and fraud towards some concealed outcome.

And if it’s true, substantially true, or even a close stab at it, then it should be easy to see how life directed in that matter was bound to break down.

Imagine a world where everyone’s dreams and nightmares were competing and vying for dominance. And don’t forget, such imagined auditory hallucinations aren’t independent of the subject. What happens because of them one day, influences the imaginations the next…so it’s self-evolving, self-programming.

And we’re going to close that loop later, too.

… For yet another explanation of the Bicameral Mind Hypothesis, here’s an old essay / book review of Janes’ book. Free download.

Consciousness: The End Of Authority

… I’ll be back tomorrow with the final installment. Then I’ll finally take all three posts and gin up a handy…you guessed it…DOWNLOAD! Until then, then.